And then, there's a bearded fetus.

I feel like we need to start with this, because I'm runnning into situations where people have clearly not internalized one of the most important things to remember about stochastic parrots that they are calling Avian Intelligence. It's all based on vector maths and probabilities. It does not know what is true, nor what is accurate, when it is constructing what word to select next. That it manages to get things correct is by accident, and by the providence of having training data that contains the correct information in it. When it constructs sentences and so on, it does so based only on what the training data and the vector math, with some fuzz factor built in, says the next word is, regardless of whether that's the right word or not. (Admittedly, being able to do the vector math is helpful, because it allows for a certain amount of synonym substitution and can make a search engine more robust at finding relevant answers if you don't hit the exact keywords. There's an aside here about how many engines are transforming your queries so that you search for things that will serve you ads or that will steer the results to prioritize those who have paid for top search engine ranking, such that even things that are good that come from machine learning are then transformed to evil purposes by capital and their priorities.)

Also up top, Dreamwidth is recruiting volunteers who would be willing to file documents in United States courts talking about the chilling effects on your speech and online activity that various state laws trying to curb social site use by teens would have, and especially from parents who would be willing to detail the way those laws would interfere with your parenting decisions. Comments screened, signing up is not committing to writing such declarations. Also, risks involve things like having to use your wallet name, and possibly having your wallet name and your Dreamwidth identity linked in publicly-available court materials or at least materials available to the state and the court.

(Because South Carolina is the latest entity to join the circus, South Carolina users are especially helpful right now, but all kinds of states have legislation that's looking to join the circus. Why South Carolina? Well, they're charging people with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" by being an identified adult in a teen-focused anti-ICE school walkout planning chat and expressing support for the walkout. Among other things they're trying to do to supposedly protect teens from the corrupting influence of adults.)

The worry about the presence of new media is perennial and perpetual, but it's not the new medium, or the new screen, that is the issue, it's the way that content is designed and presented that's trying to fragment attention and deep thinking. Accessibility and multimodality are awesome things, but there's a lot of design work that's been put into keeping us scrolling and viewing ads rather than using our tools to think and engage deeply.

Dr. Gladys West, whose precise measurements of the planet made it possible for the Global Positioning System network to come into existence, and therefore commercial (and military) satellite navigation, has died at 95 years of age. Another contribution of painstaking measurment and mathematics that undergirds so very much of the technological world today.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and occasional punchline of a joke, has finished his ministry at 84 years of age.

( What Have the Fools, Grifters, and Bigots Been Up To This Time? )

Last for tonight, twenty-five years of a very popular early-Internet meme, matching visuals to the "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by the Laziest Men on Mars, who would also give us the Pusher and Shover robots in a different viral video.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)